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3 

THE NURNBERG STOVE 



LOUISA DE LA RAME H 


ll 


(“OUIDA”) 


ILLUSTRATED 


BOSTON 

JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY 

1893 



c» 


P'Z-'I 

.d^ h 



Copyright, 1892, by 
Joseph Knight Company. 


Illustrated and Printed by The Art Publishing Co. 



PAGE 


The^Nurnberg Stove Frontispiece. 

Headpiece to List of Illustrations v 

Tailpiece to List of Illustrations vii 

Initial, The Muntze Tower . i 

“ It has paved streets and enchanting little shops *' 2 

The Valley of the Inn 4 

“ A few good souls wending home from vespers*' . 5 

“ Past the stone man-at-arms of the guard-house ** 6 

“ The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice ’* 7 

“ At his knock and call the heavy oaken door flew open ” 9 

“ He loved his pipe and a draught of ale too well ” . . 12 

“ Dorothea drew her spinning wheel by the stove and set 

it whirring ” ( . . . 14 

“ A travelling peddler ’ 7 20 

“ A little cow-keeper when he was anything ” .... 22 

“ Lived up with the cattle in the heights among the Alpine 

roses ” 24 

“ Their Aunt Ma'ila had a chalet and a little farm " . . 27 

“ I have sold Hirschvogel ” 31 

“ ‘ Oh, father, father !’ he cried ” 35 

“‘I remember now,’ he said, very low, under his 

breath” 3 8 

V 


VI 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 


PAGE 

“He lay with his face downward on the pedestal of the 

household treasure’' 42 

“ His sister came down with a light in her hand ” 43 

“ ‘ Go after it when you are bigger,’ said the neighbor ” 48 

“His Grandfather’s at Jenbach ” . 54 

The boundary between Austria and Bavaria 60 

“All the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of 

snow ” 61 

“ A gallant young chamois-hunter who had taught him to 

handle a trigger and load a muzzle " 65 

“ The small, dark curiosity shop of one Hans Rhilfer." 67 
“A right royal thing! A wonderful and never-to-be- 

rivalled thing ! " 71 

An Apostel-Krug, of Kruessen 79 

“A very droll figure of Zitzenhausen was bowing to a 

very stiff soldier in terrccuite ” 79 

“ A slim Venetian rapier and a stout Ferrara sabre ’ . 80 

“ Little Dresden cups and saucers " 80 

“ The tea-pots with their broad, round faces . . . . 80 

“ A Delft horse in blue pottery of 1489 " . .81 

“ I am the Princess of Saxe-Royal "...... 82 

“ A fat gves de Flandre beer-jug ” ... 84 

“ A bronze statuette of Vischer’s " 85 

“ Little white maid of Nymphenburg " ...... 88 

‘ ‘ A stout plate of Gubbio ” 88 

“ And what do you think the miserable creature said to 

him, with a grin ?" 89 

“ A Dutch jar of Haarlem " 90 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 


vii 

PAGE 


“ ‘My friends,’ said that clear voice from the turret of 

Niirnberg faience ” 92 

The Marienplatz 97 

The castle Berg, on Lake Starnberg 100 

The Wurm-See, or Lake of Starnberg 102 

“ The big boat moved across the lake to Leoni " . 104 

“ The porters began their toilsome journey ” . . . . 106 

“ The most beautiful chamber he had ever dreamed of ” 1 12 

“ In the presence of a young man with a beautiful dark face" 113 

“ He lifted his face to the young king ” 114 

“ ‘Yes, your Majesty,’ murmured the trembling traders " 1 1 8 

Tailpiece 123 












THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


GUST lived in a little town 
called Hall. Hall is a favorite 
name for several towns in 
Austria and in Germany ; but 
this one especial little Hall, in 
the Upper Innthal, is one of 
the most charming Old-World 
places that I know, and Au- 
gust for his part did not know 
any other. It has the green meadows and 
the great mountains all about it, and the 
gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it. 
It has paved streets and enchanting little 
shops that have all latticed panes and 
iron gratings to them ; it has a very grand 
old Gothic church, that has the noblest 
blendings of light and shadow, and marble 



2 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


tombs of dead knights, and a look of 
infinite strength and repose as a church 
should have. Then there is the Muntze 



Tower, black and white, rising out of 
greenery and looking down on a long 
wooden bridge and the broad rapid river ; 
and there is an old schloss which has been 


THE NURNBERG STOVE . 


o 


made into a guard-house, with battlements 
and frescoes and heraldic devices in gold 
and colors, and a man-at-arms carved in 
stone standing life-size in his niche and 
bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, 
but close at hand, is a cloister with beauti- 
ful marble columns and tombs, and a 
colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside 
that a small and very rich chapel : indeed, 
so full is the little town of the undisturbed 
past, that to walk in it is like opening a 
missal of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned 
and illuminated with saints and warriors, 
and it is so clean, and so still, and so 
noble, by reason of its monuments and its 
historic color, that I marvel much no one 
has ever cared to sing its praises. The 
old pious heroic life of an age at once 
more restful and more brave than ours 
still leaves its spirit there, and then there 
is the girdle of the mountains all around, 
and that alone means strength, peace, 
majesty. 

In this little town a few years ago 
August Strehla lived with his people in 


4 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


the stone-paved irregular square where 
the grand church stands. 

He was a small boy of nine years at 
that time, — a chubby-faced little man with 
rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters 
of curls the brown of ripe nuts. His 
mother was dead, his father was poor, and 
there were many mouths at home to feed. 



In this country the winters are long and 
very cold, the whole land lies wrapped 
in snow for many months, and this night 
that he was trotting home, with a jug of 
beer in his numb red hands, was terribly 
cold and dreary. The good burghers of 
Hall had shut their double shutters, and 
the few lamps there were flickered dully 
behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron cas- 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 5 

ings. The mountains indeed were beauti- 
ful, all snow-white under the stars that are 
so big in frost. Hardly any one was astir; 
a few good souls wending home from 
vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill 
blast from his tasseled 
horn as he pulled up 
his sledge before a 
hostelry, and little 
August hugging his 
jug of beer to his rag- 
ged sheep-skin coat, 
were all who were 
abroad, for the snow 
fell heavily and the 
good folks of Hall go 
early to their beds. 

He could not run, or 
he would have spilled the beer; he was 
half frozen and a little frightened, but he 
kept up his courage by saying over and 
over again to himself, “ I shall soon be at 
home with dear Hirschvogel.” 

He went on through the streets, past 
the stone man-at-arms of the guard-house, 



6 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


and so into the place where the great 
church was, and where near it stood his 
father Karl Strehla’s house, with a sculp- 



tured Bethlehem over the door-way, and 
the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings painted 
on its wall. He had been sent on a long 


7 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 

errand outside the gates in the afternoon, 
over the frozen fields and broad white 
snow, and had been belated, and had 
thought he had heard the wolves behind 
him at every step, and had reached the 
town in a great state of terror, thankful 
with all his little panting 
heart to see the oil-lamp 
burning under the first 
house-shrine. But he had 
not forgotten to call for 
the beer, and he carried it 
carefully now, though his 
hands were so numb that 
he was afraid they would 
let the jug down every 
moment. 

The snow outlined with 
white every gable and cornice of the beau- 
tiful old wooden houses; the moonlight 
shone on the gilded signs, the lambs, the 
grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint 
devices that hung before the doors ; cov- 
ered lamps burned before the Nativities 
and Crucifixions painted on the walls or 



8 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

let into the wood-work; here and there, 
where a shutter had not been closed, a 
ruddy fire-light lit up a homely interior, 
with the noisy band of children clustering 
round the house-mother and a big brown 
loaf, or some gossips spinning and listening 
to the cobbler’s or the barber’s story of a 
neighbor, while the oil-wicks glimmered, 
and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chest- 
nuts sputtered in their iron roasting-pot. 
Little August saw all these things, as he 
saw everything with his two big bright 
eyes that had such curious lights and 
shadows in them ; but he went heedfully 
on his way for the sake of the beer which a 
single slip of the foot would make him 
spill. At his knock and call the solid oak 
door, four centuries old if one, flew open, 
and the boy darted in with his beer, and 
shouted, with all the force of mirthful 
lungs, “ Oh, dear Hirschvogel, but for the 
thought of you I should have died ! ” 

It was a large barren room into which 
he rushed with so much pleasure, and the 
bricks were bare and uneven. It had a 



THE N URN BERG STOVE. 9 

walnut-wood press, handsome and very 
old, a broad deal table, and several wooden 
stools for all its furniture ; but at the top of 


the chamber, sending out warmth and 
color together as the lamp sheds its rays 
upon it, was a tower of porcelain, burnished 


IO 


7 HE N URN BERG STOVE. 


with all the hues of a king’s peacock and a 
queen’s jewels, and surmounted with 
armed figures, and shields, and flowers of 
heraldry, and a great golden crown upon 
the highest summit of all. 

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were 
the letters H. R. H., for it was in every 
portion the handwork of the great potter 
of Niirnberg, Augustin Hirschvogel, who 
put his mark thus, as all the world knows. 

The stove no doubt had stood in palaces 
and been made for princes, had warmed 
the crimson stockings of cardinals and the 
gold-broidered shoes of archduchesses, had 
glowed in presence-chambers and lent its 
carbon to help kindle sharp brains in 
anxious councils of state ; no one knew 
what it had seen or done or been fashioned 
for ; but it was a right royal thing. Yet 
perhaps it had never been more useful 
than it was now in this poor desolate 
room, sending down heat and comfort into 
the troop of children tumbled together on a 
wolfskin at its feet, who received frozen Au- 
gust among them with loud shouts of joy. 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


I 


“ Oh, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so 
cold ! ” said August, kissing its gilded 
lion’s claws. “ Is father not in, Dorothea?” 

“ No, dear. He is late.” 

Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark- 
haired and serious, and with a sweet sad 
face, for she had had many cares laid on 
her shoulders, even whilst still a mere 
baby. She was the eldest of the Strehla 
family ; and there were ten of them in all. 
Next to her there came Jan and Karl and 
Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their 
own living ; and then came August, who 
went up in the summer to the high Alps 
with the farmers’ cattle, but in winter could 
do nothing to fill his own little platter and 
pot ; and then all the little ones, who could 
only open their mouths to be fed like 
young birds, — Albrecht and Hilda, and 
Waldo and Christof, and last of all little 
three-year-old Ermengilda, with eyes like 
forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them 
the life of their mother. 

They were of that mixed race, half 
Austrian, half Italian, so common in the 


12 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

Tyrol ; some of the children were white 
and golden as lilies, others were brown 
and brilliant as fresh-fallen chestnuts. The 
father was a good man, but weak and 
weary with so many to find for and so little 
to do it with. He 
worked at the salt- 
furnaces, and by that 
gained a few florins; 
people said he would 
have worked better 
and kept his family 
more easily if he had 
not loved his pipe 
and a" draught of ale 
too well ; but this had 
only been said of him 
after his wife’s death, 
when trouble and per- 
plexity had begun to dull a brain never too 
vigorous, and to enfeeble further a charac- 
ter already too yielding. As it was, the 
wolf often bayed at the door of the Strehla 
household, without a wolf from the moun- 
tains coming down. Dorothea was one of 



THE NURNBERG STOVE . 13 

those maidens who almost work miracles, 
so far can their industry and care and 
intelligence make a home sweet and whole- 
some and a single loaf seem to swell into 
twenty. The children were always clean 
and happy, and the table was seldom 
without its big pot of soup once a day. 
Still, very poor they were, and Dorothea’s 
heart acKed with shame, for she knew that 
their father’s debts were many for flour 
and meat and clothing. Of fuel to feed 
the big stove they had always enough 
without cost, for their mother’s father was 
alive, and sold wood and fir cones and 
coke, and never grudged them to his 
grandchildren, though he grumbled at 
Strehla’s improvidence and hapless, dreamy 
ways. 

“Father says we are never to wait for 
him: we will have supper, now you have 
come home, dear,” said Dorothea, who, 
however she might fret her soul in secret 
as she knitted their hose and mended their 
shirts, never let her anxieties cast a gloom 
on the children ; only to August she did 


14 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


speak a little sometimes, because he was 
so thoughtful and so tender of her always, 
and knew as well as she did that there 
were troubles about money, — though these 
troubles were vague to them both, and the 
debtors were patient and kindly, being 
neighbors all in the old 
twisting streets between 
the guard-house and the 
river. 

Supper was a huge bowl 
of soup, with big slices of 
brown bread swimming in 
it and some onions bob- 
bing up and down : the 
bowl was soon emptied by 
ten wooden spoons, and 
then the three eldest boys slipped off to 
bed, being tired with their rough bodily 
labor in the snow all day, and Dorothea 
drew her spinning-wheel by the stove and 
set it whirring, and the little ones got 
August down upon the old worn wolf-skin 
and clamored to him for a picture or a story. 
For August was the artist of the family. 



THE NURNBERG STOVE. I 5 

He had a piece of planed deal that his 
father had given him, and some sticks of 
charcoal, and he would draw a hundred 
things he had seen in the day, sweeping 
each out with his elbow when the children 
had seen enough of it and sketching 
another in its stead, — faces and dogs’ 
heads, and men in sledges, and old women 
in their furs, and pine-trees, and cocks and 
hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and 
then — very reverently — a Madonna and 
Child. It was all very rough, for there 
was no one to teach him anything. But it 
was all life-like, and kept the whole troop 
of children shrieking with laughter, or 
watching breathless, with wide open, won- 
dering, awed eyes. 

They were all so happy : what did they 
care for the snow outside? Their little 
bodies were warm, and their hearts merry ; 
even Dorothea, troubled about the bread 
for the morrow, laughed as she spun ; and 
August, with all his soul in his work, and 
little rosy Ermengilda’s cheek on his shoul- 
der, glowing after his frozen afternoon, 


THE NURNBERG STORE. 


16 

cried out loud, smiling, as he looked up at 
the stove that was shedding its heat down 
on them all, — 

“Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost 
as great and good as the sun ! No ; you 
are greater and better, I think, because he 
goes away nobody knows where all these 
long, dark, cold hours, and does not care 
how people die for want of him; but 
you — you are always ready: just a 
little bit of wood to feed you, and you will 
make a summer for us all the winter 
through ! ” * 

The grand old stove seemed to smile 
through all its iridescent surface at the- 
praises of the child. No doubt the stove, 
though it had known three centuries and 
more, had known but very little gratitude. 

It was one of those magnificent stoves 
in enamelled faience which so excited the 
jealousy of the other potters of Niirnberg 
that in a body they demanded of the 
magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel 
should be forbidden to make any more of 
them, — the magistracy, happily, proving 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. I 7 

of a broader mind, and having no sym- 
pathy with the wish of the artisans to 
cripple their greater fellow. 

It was of great height and breadth, with 
all the majolica lustre which Hirschvogel 
learned to give to his enamels when he 
was making love to the young Venetian 
girl whom he afterwards married. There 
was the statue of a king at each corner, 
modelled with as much force and splendor 
as his friend Albrecht Diirer could have 
given unto them on copperplate or canvas. 
The body of the stove itself was divided 
into panels, which had the Ages of Man 
painted on them in polychrome; the bor- 
ders of the panels had roses and holly and 
laurel and other foliage, and German 
mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World 
moralizing, such as the old Teutons, and 
the Dutch after them, love to have on 
their chimney-places and their drinking- 
cups, their dishes and flagons. The whole 
was burnished with gilding in many parts, 
and was radiant everywhere with that 
brilliant coloring of which the Hirschvogel 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


family, painters on glass and great in 
chemistry as they were, were all masters. 

The stove was a very grand thing, as I 
say: possibly Hirschvogel had made it for 
some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time 
when he was an imperial guest at Inn- 
spruck and fashioned so many things for 
the Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine 
Welser, the Burgher’s daughter, who 
gained an Archduke’s heart by her beauty 
and the right to wear his honors by her 
wit. Nothing was known of the stove at 
this latter day in Hall. The grandfather 
Strehla, who had been a master-mason, 
had dug it up out of some ruins where he 
was building, and, finding it without a flaw, 
had taken it home, and only thought it 
worth finding because it was such a good 
one to burn. That was now sixty years 
past, and ever since then the stove had 
stood in the big desolate empty room, 
warming three generations of the Strehla 
family, and having seen nothing prettier 
perhaps in all its many years than the 
children tumbled now in a cluster like 


THE NURNBERG STOVE . 


19 


gathered flowers at its feet. For the 
Strehla children, born to nothing else, 
were all born to beauty ; white or brown, 
they were equally lovely to look upon, and 
when they went into the church to mass, 
with their curling locks and their clasped 
hands, they stood under the grim statues 
like cherubs flown down off some fresco. 

“Tell us a story, August,” they cried, in 
chorus, when they had seen charcoal pic- 
tures till they were tired ; and August did 
as he did every night, pretty nearly, — 
looked up at the stove and told them what 
he imagined of the many adventures and 
joys and sorrows of the human being who 
figured on the panels from his cradle to 
his grave. 

To the children the stove was a house- 
hold god. In summer they laid a mat of 
fresh moss all round it, and dressed it up 
with green boughs and the numberless 
beautiful wild flowers of the Tyrol country. 
In winter all their joys centered in it, and 
scampering home from school over the ice 
and snow they were happy, knowing that 


20 THE NURNBERG STORE. 

they would soon be cracking nuts or roast- 
ing chestnuts in the broad ardent glow of 
its noble tower, which rose eight feet high 
above them with all its spires and pinnacles 
and crowns. 

Once a travelling peddler 
had told them that the letters 
on it meant Augustin Hirsch- 
vogel, and that Hirschvogel 
had been a great German 
potter and painter, like his 
father before him, in the art- 
sanctified city of Nurnberg, 
and had made many such 
stoves, that were all miracles 
of beauty and of workman- 
ship, putting all his heart 
and his soul and his faith 
into his labors, as the men 
of those earlier ages did, and 
thinking but little of gold or praise. 

An old trader, too, who sold curiosities 
not far from the church, had told August 
a little more about the brave family of 
Hirschvogel, whose houses can be seen 



THE NURNBERG STOVE. 2 1 

in Niirnberg to this day; of old Veit, the 
first of them, who painted the Gothic win- 
dows of St. Sebald with the marriage of 
the Margravine; of his sons and of his 
grandsons, potters, painters, engravers all, 
and chief of them great Augustin, the 
Luca della Robbia of the North. And 
August’s imagination, always quick, had 
made a living personage out of these few 
records, and saw Hirschvogel as though 
he were in the flesh walking up and down 
the Maximilian-Strass in his visit to Inn- 
spruck, and maturing beautiful things in 
his brain as he stood on the bridge and 
gazed on the emerald-green flood of the 
Inn. 

So the stove had got to be called Hirsch- 
vogel in the family, as if it were a living 
creature, and little August was very proud 
because he had been named after that 
famous old dead German who had had the 
genius to make so glorious a thing. All 
the children loved the stove, but with 
August the love of it was a passion ; and 
in his secret heart he used to say to him- 


22 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


W" 


self, “When I am a man, I will make just 
such things too, and then I will set 
Hirschvogel in a beautiful room in a house 
that I will build myself in Innspruck just 
outside the gates, where the chestnuts are, 
by the river : that is what I will do when I 
am a man.” 

For August, a salt-baker’s 
son and a little cow-keeper 
when he was anything, was 
a dreamer of dreams, and 
^ when he was upon the high 
Alps with his cattle, with 
the stillness and the sky 
around him, was quite cer- 
tain that he would live for 
greater things than driving 
the herds up when the 
spring-tide came among the blue sea of 
gentians, or toiling down in the town with 
wood and with timber as his father and 
grandfather did every day of their lives. 
He was a strong and healthy little fellow, 
fed on the free mountain-air, and he was 
very happy, and loved his family devotedly, 





THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


2 


and was as active as a squirrel and as 
playful as a hare; but he kept his thoughts 
to himself, and some of them went a very 
long way for a little boy who was only one 
among many, and to whom nobody had 
ever paid any attention except to teach 
him his letters and tell him to fear God. 
August in winter was only a little, hungry 
school-boy, trotting to be catechised by 
the priest, or to bring the loaves from the 
bake-house, or to carry his father’s boots 
to the cobbler; and in summer he was 
only one of hundreds of cow-boys, who 
drove the poor, half-blind, blinking, stumb- 
ling cattle, ringing their throat-bells, out 
into the sweet intoxication of the sudden 
sunlight, and lived up with them in the 
heights among the Alpine roses, with only 
the clouds and the snow-summits near. 
But he was always thinking, thinking, 
thinking, for all that ; and under his little 
sheep-skin winter coat and his . rough 
hempen summer shirt his heart had as 
much courage in it as Hofer’s ever had, — 
great Hofer, who is a household word in 


24 THE nurnberg stove. 

all the Innthal, and whom August always 
reverently remembered when he went to 
the city of Innspruck and ran out by the 



foaming water-mill and under the wooded 
height of Berg Isel. 

August lay now in the warmth of the 
stove and told the children stories, his own 
little brown face growing red with excite- 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


25 


ment as his imagination glowed to fever 
heat. That human being on the panels, 
who was drawn there as a baby in a cradle, 
as a boy playing among flowers, as a lover 
sighing under a casement, as a soldier 
in the midst of strife, as a father with 
children round him, as a weary, old, blind 
man on crutches, and, lastly, as a ran- 
somed soul raised up by angels, had always 
had the most intense interest for August, 
and he had made, not one history for him, 
but a thousand ; he seldom told them the 
same tale twice. He had never seen a 
story-book in his life ; his primer and his 
mass-book were all the volumes he had. 
But nature had given him Fancy, and she 
is a good fairy that makes up for the want 
of very many things ! only, alas ! her wings 
are so very soon broken, poor thing, and 
then she is of no use at all. 

“ It is time for you all to go to bed, 
children,” said Dorothea, looking up from 
her spinning. “ Father is very late 
to-night ; you must not sit up for 
him.” 


26 


THE NURNBERG STORE. 


“ Oh, five minutes more, dear Doro- 
thea !” they pleaded ; and little rosy and 
golden Ermengilda climbed up into her 
lap. “ Hirschvogel is so warm, the beds 
are never so warm as he. Cannot you tell 
us another tale, August?” 

“ No,” cried August, whose face had 
lost its light, now that his story had come 
to an end, -and who sat serious, with his 
hands clasped on his knees, gazing on to 
the luminous arabesques of the stove. 

“ It is only a week to Christmas,” he 
said, suddenly. 

“ Grandmother’s big cakes !” chuckled 
little Christof, who was five years old, and 
thought Christmas meant a big cake and 
nothing else. 

“ What will Santa Claus find for ’Gilda 
if she be good ?” murmured Dorothea over 
the child’s sunny head ; for, however hard 
poverty might pinch, it could never pinch 
so tightly that Dorothea would not find 
some wooden toy and some rosy apples to 
put in her little sister’s socks. 

“ Father Max has promised me a big 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 27 

goose, because I saved the calf’s life in 
June,” said August ; it was the twentieth 
time he had told them so that month, he 
was so proud of it. 

‘‘And Aunt Mai'la will be sure to send 
us wine and honey and a barrel of flour ; 



she always does,” said Albrecht. Their 
aunt Mai’la had a chalet and a little farm 
over on the green slopes toward Dorf 
Ampas. 

“ I shall go up into the woods and get 
Hirschvogel’s crown,” said August ; they 
always crowned Hirschvogel for Christmas 
with pine boughs and ivy and mountain- 


28 THE N URN BERG STOVE. 

berries. The heat soon withered the 
crown ; but it was part of the religion of 
the day to them, as much so as it was to 
cross themselves in church and raise their 
voices in the “ O Salutaris Hostia. ” 

And they fell chatting of all they would 
do on the Christ-night, and one little voice 
piped loud against another’s, and they 
were as happy as though their stockings 
would be full of golden purses and jew- 
elled toys, and the big goose in the 
soup-pot seemed to them such a meal as 
kings would envy. 

In the midst of their chatter and laughter 
a blast of frozen air and a spray of driven 
snow struck like ice through the room, 
and reached them even in the warmth of 
the old wolf-skins and the great stove. It 
was the door which had opened and let in 
the cold ; it was their father who had 
come home. 

The younger children ran joyous to 
meet him. Dorothea pushed the one 
wooden arm-chair of the room to the stove, 
and August flew to set the jug of beer on 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


2 9 


a little round table, and fill a long clay 
pipe ; for their father was good to them 
all, and seldom raised his voice in anger, 
and they had been trained by the mother 
they had loved to dutifulness and obedience 
and a watchful affection. 

To-night Karl Strehla responded very 
wearily to the young ones’ welcome, and 
came to the wooden chair with a tired step 
and sat down heavily, not noticing either 
pipe or beer. 

“Are you not well, dear father?” his 
daughter asked him. 

“ I am well enough,” he answered, dully 
and sat there with his head bent, letting 
the lighted pipe grow cold. 

He was a fair, tall man, gray before his 
time, and bowed with labor. 

“ Take the children to bed,” he said, 
suddenly, at last, and Dorothea obeyed. 
August stayed behind, curled before the 
stove ; at nine years old, and when one 
earns money in the summer from the 
farmers, one is not altogether a child any 
more, at least in one’s own estimation. 


30 THE NURNBERG STOVE . 

August did not heed his father’s silence : 
he was used to it. Karl Strehla was a 
man of few words, and, being of weakly 
health, was usually too tired at the end of 
the day to do more than drink his beer 
and sleep. August lay on the wolf-skin, 
dreamy and comfortable, looking up 
through his drooping eyelids at the golden 
coronets on the crest of the great stove, 
and wondering for the millionth time 
whom it had been made for, and what 
grand places and scenes it had known. 

Dorothea came down from putting the 
little ones in their beds ; the cuckoo-clock 
in the corner struck eight ; she looked to 
her father and the untouched pipe, then 
sat down to her spinning, saying nothing. 
She thought he had been drinking in some 
tavern ; it had been often so with him of late. 

There was a long silence; the cuckoo 
called the quarter twice ; August dropped 
asleep, his curls falling over his face ; 
Dorothea’s wheel hummed like a cat. 

Suddenly Karl Strehla struck his hand on 
the table, sending the pipe on the ground. 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. ' 3 1 

“I have sold Hirschvogel,” he said; and 
his voice was husky and ashamed in his 
throat. The spinning-wheel stopped. 
August sprang erect out of his sleep. 

“Sold Hirschvogel!” If their father 
had dashed the holy 
crucifix on the floor 
at their feet and spat 
on it, they could not 
have shuddered under 
the horror of a greater 
blasphemy. 

“I have sold Hirsch- 
vogel ! ” said Karl 
Strehla, in the same 
husky, dogged voice. 

“I have sold it to a 
travelling trader in 
such things for two 
hundred florins. What 
would you? — I owe double that. He saw 
it this morning when you were all out. 
He will pack it and take it to Munich to- 
morrow.” 

Dorothea gave a low shrill cry : 



32 THE N URN BERG STOVE. 

“Oh, father? — the children — in mid- 
winter ! ” 

She turned white as the snow without ; 
her words died away in her throat. 

August stood, half blind with sleep, 
staring with dazed eyes as his cattle stared 
at the sun when they came out from their 
winter’s prison. 

“It is not true! It is not true!” he 
muttered. “You are jesting, father?” 

Strehla broke into a dreary laugh. 

“It is true. Would you like to know 
what is true too? — that the bread you eat, 
and the meat you put in this pot, and the 
roof you have over your heads, are none 
of them paid for, have been none of them 
paid for, for months and months : if it had 
not been for your grandfather I should 
have been in prison all summer and 
autumn, and he is out of patience and will 
do no more now. There is no work to be 
had ; the masters go to younger men : 
they say I work ill ; it may be so. Who 
can keep his head above water with ten 
hungry children dragging him down ? 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


33 


When your mother lived it was different. 
Boy, you stare at me as if I were a mad 
dog! You have made a god of yon china 
thing. Well — it goes: goes to-morrow. 
Two hundred florins, that is something. 
It will keep me out of prison for a little, 
and with the spring things may turn ” 

August stood like a creature paralyzed. 
His eyes were wide open, fastened on his 
father’s with terror and incredulous horror; 
his face had grown as white as his sister’s ; 
his chest heaved with tearless sobs. 

“It is not true! It is not true!” he 
echoed stupidly. It seemed to him that 
the very skies must fall, and the earth 
perish, if they could take away Hirsch- 
vogel. They might as soon talk of tearing 
down God’s sun out of the heavens. 

“You will find it true,” said his father, 
doggedly, and angered because he was in 
his own soul bitterly ashamed to have 
bartered away the heirloom and treasure 
of his race, and the comfort and health- 
giver of his young children. “You will 
find it true. The dealer has paid me half 


34 the nurnberg stove. 

the money to-night, and will pay me the 
other half to-morrow when he packs it up 
and takes it away to Munich. No doubt 
it is worth a great deal more, — at least I 
suppose so, as he gives that, — but beggars 
cannot be choosers. The little black stove 
in the kitchen will warm you all just as 
well. Who would keep a gilded, painted 
thing in a poor house like this, when one 
can make two hundred florins by it? 
Dorothea, you never sobbed more when 
your mother died. What is it, when all is 
said? — a bit of hardware, much too grand- 
looking for such a room as this. If all the 
Strehlas had not been born fools it would 
have been sold a century ago, when it was 
dug up out of the ground. ‘It is a stove 
for a museum, ’ the trader said when he 
saw it. To a museum let it go.” 

August gave a shrill shriek like a hare’s 
when it is caught for its death, and threw 
himself on his knees at his father’s feet. 

“Oh, father, father!” he cried, convul- 
sively, his hands closing on Strehla’s 
knees, and his uplifted face blanched and 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 35 

distorted with terror. “ Oh, father, dear 
father, you cannot mean what you say? 
Send it away — our life, our sun, our joy, 
our comfort? we shall all die in the dark 
and the cold. Sell me rather. Sell me to 
any trade or any pain you like ; I will not 
mind. But Hirsch- 
vogel ! — it is like sell- 
ing the very cross off 
the altar ! You must 
be in jest. You could 
not do such a thing 
— you could not! — 
you who have always 
been gentle and good, 
and who have sat in 
the warmth here year 
after year with our 
mother. It is not a piece of hardware, as 
you say ; it is a living thing, for a great 
man’s thoughts and fancies have put life 
into it, and it loves us though we are only 
poor little children, and we love it with all 
our hearts and souls, and up in heaven I 
am sure the dead Hirschvogel knows ! 



36 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

Oh, listen ; I will go and try and get work 
to-morrow ; I will ask them to let me cut 
ice or make the paths through the snow. 
There must be something I could do, and 
I will beg the people we owe money to, to 
wait ; they are all neighbors, they will be 
patient. But sell Hirschvogel ! — oh, never ! 
never ! never ! Give the florins back to 
the vile man. Tell him it would be like 
selling the shroud out of mother’s coffin, 
or the golden curls off Ermengilda’s head ! 
Oh, father, dear father ! do hear me, for 
pity’s sake !” 

Strehla was moved by the boy’s anguish. 
He loved his children, though he was often 
weary of them, and their pain was pain to 
him. But besides emotion, and stronger 
than emotion, was the anger that August 
roused in him : he hated and despised him- 
self for the barter of the heirloom of his 
race, and every word of the child stung 
him with a stinging sense of shame. 

And he spoke in his wrath rather than 
in his sorrow. 

“ You are a little fool,” he said, harshly, 


THE N URN BERG STOVE . 


37 


as they had never heard him speak. “You 
rave like a play-actor. Get up and go to 
bed. The stove is sold. There is no 
more to be said. Children like you have 
nothing to do with such matters. The 
stove is sold, and goes to Munich to-mor- 
row. What is it to you ? Be thankful I 
can get bread for you. Get on your legs, 
I say, and go to bed.” 

Strehla took up the jug of ale as he 
paused, and drained it slowly as a man who 
had no cares. 

August sprang to his feet and threw 
his hair back off his face ; the blood rushed 
into his cheeks, making them scarlet; his 
great soft eyes flamed alight with furious 
passion. 

“You dare not!” he cried, aloud, “you 
dare not sell it, I say! It is not yours 

alone; it is ours ” 

.Strehla flung the emptied jug on the 
bricks with a force that shivered it to 
atoms, and, rising to his feet, struck his 
son a blow that felled him to the floor. It 
was the first time in all his life that he had 


38 THE NURNBERG STORE . 

ever raised his hand against any one of his 
children. 

Then he took the oil-lamp that stood at 
his elbow and stumbled off to his own 
chamber with a cloud before his eyes. 

“ What has happened ? ” said August, a 
little while later, as he opened his eyes and 
saw Dorothea weeping 
above him on the wolf- 
skin before the stove. 
He had been struck 
backward, and his head 
had fallen on the hard 
bricks where the wolf- 
skin did not reach. He 
sat up a moment, with 
his face bent upon his hands. 

“ I remember now,” he said, very low, 
under his breath. 

Dorothea showered kisses on him, while 
her tears fell like rain. 

“ But, oh, dear, how could you speak so 
to father?” she murmured. “ It was very 
wrong.” 

“ No, I was right,” said August, and his 



THE NURKBERG STOVE. 


39 


little mouth, that hitherto had only curled 
in laughter, curved downward with a fixed 
and bitter seriousness. “How dare he? 
How dare he ? ” he muttered, with his head 
sunk in his hands. “ It is not his alone. 
It belongs to us all. It is as much yours 
and mine as it is his.” 

Dorothea could only sob in answer. 
She was too frightened to speak. The 
authority of their parents in the house had 
never in her remembrance been ques- 
tioned. 

“ Are you hurt by the fall, dear Au- 
gust?” she murmured, at length, for he 
looked to her so pale and strange. 

“Yes — no. I do not know. What does 
it matter?” 

He sat up upon the wolf-skin with pas- 
sionate pain upon his face; all his soul was 
in rebellion, and he was only a child and 
was powerless. 

“ It is a sin ; it is a theft ; it is an in- 
famy,” he said slowly, his eyes fastened on 
the gilded feet of Hirschvogel. 

“ Oh, August, do not say such things 


40 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

of father!” sobbed his sister. ‘'Whatever 
he does, we ought to think it right.” 

August laughed aloud. 

“ Is it right that he should spend his 
money in drink? — that he should let orders 
lie unexecuted ? — that he should do his 
work so ill that no one cares to employ 
him ? — that he should live on grandfather’s 
charity, and then dare sell a thing that is 
ours every whit as much as it is his ? To 
sell Hirschvogel ! Oh, dear God ! I would 
sooner sell my soul ! ” 

“ August ! ” cried Dorothea, with piteous 
entreaty. He terrified her, she could not 
recognize her little, gay, gentle brother in 
those fierce and blasphemous words. 

August laughed aloud again ; then all at 
once his laughter broke down into bitterest 
weeping. He threw himself forward on 
the stove, covering it with kisses, and 
sobbing as though his heart would burst 
from his bosom. 

What could he do ? Nothing, nothing, 
nothing ! 

“ August, dear August,” whispered 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 41 

Dorothea piteously, and trembling all 
over, — for she was a very gentle girl, and 
fierce feeling terrified her, — “August, do 
not lie there. Come to bed : it is quite late. 
In the morning you will be calmer. It is 
horrible indeed, and we shall die of cold, 
at least the little ones ; but if it be fathers 
will ” 

“Let me alone,” said August, through 
his teeth, striving to still the storm of sobs 
that shook him from head to foot. “ Let 
me alone. In the morning! — how can 
you speak of the morning ? ” 

“ Come to bed, dear,” sighed his sister. 
“ Oh, August, do not lie and look like that ! 
you frighten me. Do come to bed.” 

“ I shall stay here.” 

“ Here ! all night ! ” 

“ They might take it in the night. Be- 
sides, to leave it now ! ” 

“ But it is cold ! the fire is out.” 

“ It will never be warm any more, nor 
shall we.” 

All his childhood had gone out of him, 
all his gleeful, careless, sunny temper had 


42 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 



gone with it ; he spoke sullenly and wearily, 
choking down the great sobs in his chest. 
To him it was as if the end of the world 
had come. 

His sister lingered by him while striving 
to persuade him to go to his place in the 
little crowded bed- 
chamber with Al- 
brecht and Waldo and 
Christof. But it was 
in vain. “I shall stay 
here,” was all he an- 
swered her. And he 
stayed, — all the night 
long. 

The lamps went 
out ; the rats came 
and ran across the 
floor ; as the hours crept on through 
midnight and past, the cold intensified 
and the air of the room grew like ice. 
August did not move ; he lay with his face 
downward on the golden and rainbow 
hued pedestal of the household treasure, 
which henceforth was to be cold for ever- 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 43 

more, an exiled thing in a foreign city in 
a far-off land. 

Whilst yet it was dark his three elder 
brothers came down the stairs and let 
themselves out, each bearing his lantern 
and going to his work 
in stone-yard and tim- 
ber-yard and at the salt- 
works. They did not 
notice him ; they did not 
know what had hap- 
pened. 

A little later his sis- 
ter came down with a 
light in her hand to 
make ready the house 
ere morning should 
break. 

She stole up to him 
and laid her hand on 
his shoulder timidly. 

“ Dear August, you 
August, do look up! do speak!” 

August raised his eyes with a wild, fe- 
verish, sullen look in them that she had 



44 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


never seen there. His face was ashen white : 
his lips were like fire. He had not slept 
all night ; but his passionate sobs had given 
way to delirious waking dreams and numb 
senseless trances, which had alternated one 
on another all through the freezing, lonely, 
horrible hours. 

“ It will never be warm again,” he mut- 
tered, “ never again ! ” 

Dorothea clasped him with trembling 
hands. 

“August! do you not know me?” she 
cried* in an agony. “ I am Dorothea. 
Wake up, dear — wake up ! It is morning, 
only so dark ! ” 

August shuddered all over. 

“ The morning ! ” he echoed. 

He slowly rose up on to his feet. 

“ I will go to grandfather,” he said, very 
low. “He is always good : perhaps he 
could save it. ” 

Loud blows with the heavy iron knocker 
of the house-door drowned his words. A 
strange voice called aloud through the 
keyhole, — 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


45 


“ Let me in ! Quick! — there is no time 
to lose ! More snow like this, and the 
roads will be a® blocked. Let me in ! Do 
you hear? I am come to take the great 
stove.” 

August sprang erect, his fists doubled, 
his eyes blazing. 

“You shall never touch it ! ” he screamed ; 
“ you shall never touch it ! ” 

“Who shall prevent us?” laughed a big 
man, who was a Bavarian, amused at the 
fierce little figure fronting him. 

“I!” said August. “You shall never 
have it ! you shall kill me first ! ” 

“ Strehla,” said the big man, as August’s 
father entered the room, “you have got a 
little mad dog here : muzzle him. ” 

One way and another they did muzzle 
him. He fought like a little demon, and 
hit out right and left, and one of his blows 
gave the Bavarian a black eye. But he 
was soon mastered by four grown men, 
and his father flung him with no light hand 
out from the door of the back entrance, 
and the buyers of the stately and beautiful 


46 THE NURNBERG STOVE . 

stove set to work to pack it heedfully and 
carry it away. 

When Dorothea stole out to look for 
August, he was nowhere in sight. She 
went back to little ’Gilda, who was ailing, 
and sobbed over the child, whilst the others 
stood looking on, dimly understanding that 
with Hirschvogel was going all the warmth 
of their bodies, all the light of their hearth. 

Even their father now was very sorry 
and ashamed ; but two hundred florins 
seemed a big sum to him, and, after all, 
he thought the children could warm them- 
selves quite as well at the black iron stove 
in the kitchen. Besides, whether he re- 
greted it now or not, the work of the 
Niirnberg potter was sold irrevocably, and 
he had to stand still and see the men from 
Munich wrap it in manifold wrappings and 
bear it out into the snowy air to where an 
ox-cart stood in waiting for it. 

In another moment Hirschvogel was 
gone, — gone forever and aye. 

August stood still for a time, leaning, 
sick and faint from the violence that had 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 47 

been used to him, against the back wall of 
the house. The wall looked on a court 
where a well was, and the backs of other 
houses, and beyond them the spire of the 
Muntze Tower and the peaks of the moun- 
tains. 

Into the court an old neighbor hobbled, 
for water, and, seeing the boy, said to him, — 

“ Child, is it true your father is selling 
the big painted stove ? ” 

August nodded his head, then burst into 
a passion of tears. 

“ Well, for sure he is a fool,” said the 
neighbor. “ Heaven forgive me for calling 
him so before his own child ! but the stove 
was worth a mint of money. I do remem- 
ber in my young days, in old Anton’s time 
(that was your great-grandfather, my lad) , 
a stranger from Vienna saw it, and said 
that it was worth its weight in gold.” 

August’s sobs went on their broken, im- 
petuous course. 

“ I loved it ! I loved it ! ” he moaned. 
“ I do not care what its value was. I 
loved it ! / loved it ! ” 


48 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


“You little simpleton ! ” said the old 
man, kindly. “ But you are wiser than 
your father, when all’s said. If sell it he 



must, he should have taken it to good 
Herr Steiner over at Spriiz, who would 
have given him honest value. But no 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


49 


doubt they took him over his beer, ay, ayf 
but if I were you I would do better than 
cry. I would go after it.” 

August raised his head, the tears raining 
down his cheeks. 

“ Go after it when you are bigger,” said 
the neighbor, with a good-natured wish to 
cheer him up a little. “The world is a 
small thing after all : I was a travelling 
clockmaker once upon a time, and I know 
that your stove will be safe enough who- 
ever gets it ; anything that can be sold for 
a round sum is always wrapped up in cot- 
ton wool by everybody. Ay, ay, don’t cry 
so much ; you will see your stove again 
some day.” 

Then the old man hobbled away to draw 
his brazen pail full of water at the well. 

August remained leaning against the 
wall ; his head was buzzing and his heart 
fluttering with the new idea which had pre- 
sented itself to his mind. “ Go after it,” 
had said the old man. He thought, “ Why 
not go with it ? ” He loved it better than 
any one, even better than Dorothea ; and 


50 THE N URN BERG STOVE. 

he shrank from the thought of meeting his 
father again, his father who had sold Hirsch- 
vogel. 

He was by this time in that state of 
exaltation in which the impossible looks 
quite natural and common-place. His 
tears were still wet on his pale cheeks, 
but they had ceased to fall. He ran out of 
the court-yard by a little gate, and across 
to the huge Gothic porch of the church. 
From there he could watch unseen his 
father’s house-door, at which were always 
hanging some blue-and-gray pitchers, such 
as are common and so picturesque in 
Austria, for a part of the house was let to 
a man who dealt in pottery. 

He hid himself in the grand portico, 
which he had so often passed through to 
go to mass or complin within, and pres- 
ently his heart gave a great leap, for he 
saw the straw-enwrapped stove brought 
out and laid with infinite care on the bul- 
lock-dray. Two of the Bavarian men 
mounted beside it, and the sleigh-wagon 
slowly crept, over the snow of the place, — 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 5 I 

snow crisp and hard as stone. The noble 
old minster looked its grandest and most 
solemn, with its dark-gray stone and its 
vast archways, and its porch that was itself 
as big as many a church, and its strange 
gargoyles and lamp-irons black against the 
snow on its roof and on the pavement ; but 
for once August had no eyes for it ; he 
only watched for his old friend. Then he, 
a little unnoticeable figure enough, like a 
score of other boys in Hall, crept, unseen 
by any of his brothers or sisters, out of the 
porch and over the shelving uneven 
square, and followed in the wake of the 
dray. 

Its course lay towards the station of the 
railway, which is close to the salt-works, 
whose smoke at times sullies this part of 
clean little Hall, though it does not do 
very much damage. From Hall the iron 
road runs northward through glorious 
country to Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, Buda, 
and southward over the Brenner into Italy. 
Was Hirschvogel going north or south? 
This at least he would soon know. 


52 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

August had often hung about the little 
station, watching the trains come and go 
and dive into the heart of the hills and 
vanish. No one said, anything to him for 
idling about ; people are kind-hearted and 
easy of temper in this pleasant land, and 
children and dogs are both happy there. 
He heard the Bavarians arguing and vo- 
ciferating a great deal, and learned that 
they meant to go too and wanted to go 
with the great stove itself. But this they 
could not do, for neither could the stove 
go by a passenger-train nor they them- 
selves go in a goods-train. So at length 
they insured their precious burden for a 
large sum, and consented to send it by a 
luggage-train which was to pass through 
Hall in half an hour. The swift trains 
seldom deign to notice the existence of 
Hall at all. 

August heard, and a desperate resolve 
made itself up in his little mind. Where 
Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave 
one terrible thought to Dorothea — poor, 
gentle Dorothea ! — sitting, in the cold at 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 53 

home, then set to work to execute his pro- 
ject. How he managed it he never knew 
very clearly himself, but certain it is that 
when the goods-train from the north, that 
had come all the way from Linz on the 
Danube, moved out of Hall, August was 
hidden behind the stove in the great cov- 
ered truck, and wedged, unseen and 
undreamt of by any human creature, 
amidst the cases of wood-carving, of clocks 
and clock-work, of Vienna toys, of Turkish 
carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian 
wines, which shared the same abode as 
did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel. 
No doubt he was very naughty, but it never 
occurred to him that he was so : his whole 
mind and soul were absorbed in the one 
entrancing idea, to follow his beloved friend 
and fire-king. 

It was very dark in the closed truck, 
which had only a little window above the 
door ; and it was crowded, and had a 
strong smell in it from the Russian hides 
and the hams that were in it. But August 
was not frightened ; he was close to 


54 'ihe nurnberg stove. 

Hirschvogel, and presently he meant to be 
closer still ; for he meant to do nothing 
less than get inside Hirschvogel itself. 
Being a shrewd little boy, and having had 
by great luck two silver groschen in his 
breeches-pocket, which he had earned the 



day before by chopping wood, he had 
bought some bread and sausage at the sta- 
tion of a woman there who knew him, and 
who thought he was going out to his uncle 
Joachim’s chalet above Jenbach. This he 
had with him, and this he ate in the dark- 
ness and the lumbering, pounding, thun- 
dering noise which made him giddy, as 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


55 


never had he been in a train of any kind 
before. Still he ate, having had no break- 
fast, and being a child, and half a German, 
and not knowing at all how or when he 
ever would eat again. 

When he had eaten, not as much as he 
wanted, but as much as he thought was 
prudent (for who could say when he would 
be able to buy anything more ?) , he set to 
work like a little mouse to make a hole in 
the withes of straw and hay which en- 
veloped the stove. If it had been put in a 
packing-case he would have been defeated 
at the onset. As it was, he gnawed, and 
nibbled, and pulled, and pushed, just as a 
mouse would have done, making his hole 
where he guessed that the opening of the 
stove was, — the opening through which 
he had so often thrust the big oak logs to 
feed it. No one disturbed him ; the heavy 
train went lumbering on and on, and he 
saw nothing at all of the beautiful moun- 
tains, and shining waters, and great forests 
through which he was being carried. He 
was hard at work getting through the straw 


56 THE NURNBERG STOVE . 

and hay and twisted ropes ; and get 
through them at last he did, and found the 
door of the stove, which he knew so well, 
and which was quite large enough for a 
child of his age to slip through, and it was 
this which he had counted upon doing. 
Slip through he did, as he had often done 
at home for fun, and curled himself up 
there to see if he could anyhow remain 
during many hours. He found that he 
could ; air came in through the brass fret-, 
work of the stove ; t and with admirable 
caution in such a little fellow he leaned out, 
drew the hay and straw together, re- 
arranged the ropes, so that no one could 
ever have dreamed a little mouse had been 
at them. Then he curled himself up again, 
this time more like a dormouse than any- 
thing else ; and, being safe inside his dear 
Hirschvogel and intensely cold, he went 
fast asleep as if he were in his own bed at 
home with Albrecht, and Christof on either 
side of him. The train lumbered on, 
stopped often and long, as the habit of 
goods-trains is, sweeping the snow away 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


57 


with its cow-switcher, and rumbling 
through the deep heart of the mountains, 
with its lamps aglow like the eyes of a dog 
in a night of frost. 

The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fash- 
ion, and the child slept soundly, for a long 
while. When he did awake, it was quite 
dark outside in the land ; he could not see, 
and of course he was in absolute darkness ; 
and for a while he was sorely frightened, 
and trembled terribly, and sobbed in a 
quiet heart-broken fashion, thinking of 
them all at home. Poor Dorothea ! how 
anxious she would be ! How she would 
run over the town and walk up to grand- 
father’s at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even 
send over to Jenbach, thinking he had 
taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! His 
conscience smote him for the sorrow he 
must be even then causing to his gentle 
sister; but it never occurred to him to try 
and go back. If he once were to lose 
sight of Hirschvogel how could he ever 
hope to find it again? how could he ever 
know whither it had gone, — north, south, 


58 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

east or west ? The old neighbor had said 
that the world was small ; but August 
knew at least that it must have a great 
many places in it : that he had seen himself 
on the maps on his school-house walls. 
Almost any other little boy would, I think, 
have been frightened out of his wits at the 
position in which he found himself ; but 
August was brave, and he had a firm belief 
that God and Hirschvogel would take care 
of him. The master-potter of Niirnberg 
was always present to his mind, a kindly, 
benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling man- 
ifestly in that porcelain tower whereof he 
had been the maker. 

A droll fancy, you say ? But every 
child with a soul in him has quite as quaint 
fancies as this one was of August’s. 

So he got over his terror and his sob- 
bing both, though he was so utterly in the 
dark. He did not feel cramped at all, 
because the stove was so large, and air he 
had in plenty, as it came through the fret- 
work running round the top. He was 
hungry again, and again nibbled with pru- 


59 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

dence at his loaf and his sausage. He 
could not at all tell the hour. Every time 
the train stopped and he heard the bang- 
ing, stamping, shouting, and jangling of 
chains that went on, his heart seemed to 
jump up into his mouth. If they should 
find him out ! Sometimes porters came 
and took away this case and the other, a 
sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, 
now a dead chamois. Every time the men 
trampled near him, and swore at each 
other, and banged this and that to and fro, 
he was so frightened that his very breath 
seemed to stop. When they came to lift 
the stove out, would they find him ? and if 
they did find him, would they kill him ? 
That was what he kept thinking of all the 
way, all through the dark hours, which 
seemed without end. The goods-trains 
are usually very slow, and are many 
days doing what a quick train does in a 
few hours. This one was quicker than 
most, because it was bearing goods to the 
King of Bavaria ; still, it took all the short 
winter’s day and the long winter’s night 


6o 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


and half another day to go over ground 
that the mail-trains cover in a forenoon. 
It passed great armored Kuffstein standing 
across the beautiful and solemn gorge, 
denying the right of way to all the foes of 
Austria. It passed twelve hours later, 



after lying by in out-of-the-way stations, 
pretty Rosenheim, that marks the border 
of Bavaria. And here the Niirnberg stove, 
with August inside it, was lifted out heed- 
fully and set under a covered way. When 
it was lifted out, the boy had hard work to 
keep in his screams ; he was tossed to and 
fro as the men lifted the huge thing, and 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


6l 


the earthenware walls of his beloved fire- 
king were not cushions of down. However, 
though they swore and grumbled at the 
weight of it, they never suspected that a 
living child was inside it, and they carried 
it out on to the platform and set it down 



it passed the rest of the night and all the 
next morning, ajid August was all the 
while within it. 

The 'winds of early winter sweep bitterly 
over Rosenheim, and all the vast Bavarian 
plain was one white sheet of snow. If there 
had not been whole armies of men at work 


62 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


always clearing the iron rails of the snow, 
no trains could ever have run at all. Hap- 
pily for August, the thick wrappings in 
which the stove was enveloped and the 
stoutness of its own make screened him 
from the cold, of which, else, he must have 
died, — frozen. He had still some of his 
loaf, and a little — a very little — of his 
sausage. What he did begin to suffer 
from was thirst ; and this frightened him 
almost more than anything else, for Doro- 
thea had read aloud to them one night a 
story of the tortures some wrecked men 
had endured because they could not find 
any water but the salt sea. It was many 
hours since he had last taken a drink from 
the wooden spout of their old pump, which 
brought them the sparkling, ice-cold water 
of the hills. 

But, fortunately for him, the stove, 
having been marked and registered as 
“ fragile and valuable,” was not treated 
quite like a mere bale of goods, and the 
Rosenheim station-master, who knew its 
consignees, resolved to send it on by a 


THE NURNBERG STOVE . 


63 


passenger-train that would leave there at 
daybreak. And when this train went out, 
in it, among piles of luggage belonging to 
other travellers, to Vienna, Prague, Buda- 
pest, Salzburg, was August, still undis- 
covered, still doubled up like a mole in the 
winter under the grass. Those words, 
“ fragile and valuable,” had made the men 
lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He 
had begun to get used to his prison, and a 
little used to the incessant pounding and 
jumbling and rattling and shaking with 
which modern travel is always accom- 
panied, though modern invention does 
deem itself so mightily clever. All in the 
dg,rk he was, and he was terribly thirsty ; 
but he kept feeling the earthenware sides 
of the Niirnberg giant and saying, softly, 
“ Take care of me ; oh, take care of me, 
dear Hirschvogel ! ” 

He did not .say, “Take me back;” for, 
now that he was fairly out in the world, he 
wished to see a little of it. He began to 
think that they must have been all over 
the world in all this time that the rolling 


64 THE N UR N BERG STOVE . 

and roaring and hissing and jangling had 
been about his ears ; shut up in the dark, 
he began to remember all the tales that 
had been told in Yule round the fire at his 
grandfather’s good house at Dorf, of 
gnomes and elves and subterranean ter- 
rors, and the Erl King riding on the black 
horse of night, and — and — and he began 
to sob and to tremble again, and this time 
did scream outright. But the steam was 
screaming itself so loudly that no one, 
had there been any one nigh, would have 
heard him ; and in another minute or so 
the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and 
he in his cage could hear men crying 
aloud, “ Miinchen ! Miinchen ! ” 

Then he knew enough of geography to 
know that he was in the heart of Bavaria. 
He had had an uncle killed in the Bayeris- 
chenwald by the Bavarian forest guards, 
when in the excitement of hunting a black 
bear he had overpassed the limits of the 
Tyrol frontier. 

That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young 
chamois-hunter who had taught him to 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


65 


handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made 
the very name of Bavaria a terror to 
August. 

“ It is Bavaria ! It is Bavaria ! ” he sob- 
bed to the stove ; but the stove said noth- 
ing to him ; it had no 
fire in it. A stove 
can no more speak 
without fire than a 
man can see without 
light. Give it fire, 
and it will sing to 
you, tell tales to you, 
offer you in return all 
the sympathy you 
ask. 

“It is Bavaria!” 
sobbed August ; for it 
is always a name of 
dread augury to the 
Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter strug- 
gles and midnight shots and untimely deaths 
which come from those meetings of jager 
and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But 
the train stopped; Munich was reached, and 



66 THE N URN BERG STOVE. 

August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking 
like a little aspen-leaf, felt himself once 
more carried out on the shoulders of men, 
rolled along on a truck, and finally set 
down, where he knew not, only he knew he 
was thirsty, — so thirsty! If only he could 
have reached his hand out and scooped up 
a little snow ! 

He thought he had been moved on this 
truck many miles, but in truth the stove 
had been only taken from the railway- 
station to a shop in the Marienplatz. Fort- 
unately, the stove was always set upright 
on its four gilded feet, an injunction to that 
effect having been affixed to its written 
label, and on its gilded feet it stood now in 
the small dark curiosity-shop of one Hans 
Rhilfer. 

“ I shall not unpack it till Anton comes,” 
he heard a man’s voice say ; and then 
he heard a key grate in a lock, and by 
the unbroken stillness that ensued he 
concluded he was alone, and ventured to 
peep through the straw and hay. What 
he saw was a small square room filled with 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


6 7 


pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue 
jugs, old steel armor, shields, daggers, 
Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, 
and all the art lumber and fabricated rub- 
bish of a bric-a-brac dealer’s. It seemed a 



wonderful place to him ; but, oh ! was there 
one drop of water in it all ? That was his 
single thought ; for his tongue was parch- 
ing, and his throat felt on fire, and his 
chest began to be dry and choked as with 
dust. There was not a drop of water, but 
there was a lattice window grated, and 


68 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


beyond the window was a wide stone ledge 
covered with snow. August cast one look 
at the locked door, darted out of his hiding- 
place, ran and opened the window, cram- 
med the snow into his mouth again and 
again, and then flew back into the stove, 
drew the hay and straw over the place he 
entered by, tied the cords, and shut the 
brass door down on himself. He had 
brought some big icicles in with him, and 
by them his thirst was finally, if only tem- 
porarily, quenched. Then he sat still in 
the bottom of the stove, listening intently, 
wide awake, and once more recovering his 
natural boldness. 

The thought of Dorothea kept nipping 
his heart and his conscience with a hard 
squeeze now and then ; but he thought to 
himself, “If I can take her back Hirsch- 
vogel, then how pleased she will be, and 
how little ’Gilda will clap her hands!” He 
was not at all selfish in his love for Hirsch- 
vogel : he wanted it for them all at home 
quite as much as for himself. There was 
at the bottom of his mind a kind of ache of 


THE NURNBERG STOVE 


69 


shame that his father — his own father — 
should have stripped their hearth and sold 
their honor thus. 

A robin had been perched upon a stone 
griffin sculptured on a house-eave near. 
August had felt for the crumbs of his 
loaf in his pocket, and had thrown them to 
the little bird sitting so easily on the frozen 
snow. 

In the darkness where he was he now 
heard a little song, made faint by the stove- 
wall and the window-glass that was between 
him and it, but still distinct and exquisitely 
sweet. It was the robin, singing after 
feeding on the crumbs. August, as he 
heard, burst into tears. He thought of 
Dorothea, who every morning threw out 
some grain or some bread on the snow be- 
fore the church. “What use is it going 
there ,” she said, “if we forget the sweetest 
creatures God has made?” Poor Doro- 
thea! Poor, good, tender, much-burdened 
little soul ! He thought of her till his tears 
ran like rain. 

Yet it never once occurred to him to 


JO THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

dream of going home. Hirschvogel was 
here. 

Presently the key turned in the lock of 
the door ; he heard heavy footsteps and the 
voice of the man who had said to his father, 
“You have a little mad dog ; muzzle him ! ” 
The voice said, “ Ay, ay, you have called 
me a fool many times. Now you shall see 
what I have gotten for two hundred dirty 
florins. Potztausend ! never did you do 
such a stroke of work.” 

Then the other voice grumbled and 
swore, and the steps of the two men ap- 
proached more closely, and the heart of the 
child went pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse’s 
does when it is on the top of a cheese and 
hears a housemaid’s broom sweeping near. 
They began to strip the stove of its wrap- 
pings: that he could tell by the noise they 
made with the hay and the straw. Soon they 
had stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew 
by the oaths and exclamations of wonder 
and surprise and rapture which broke from 
the man who had not seen it before. 

“ A right royal thing ! A wonderful and 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 71 

never-to-be-rivalled thing ! Grander than 
the great stove of Hohen-Salzburg ! Sub- 
lime ! magnificent ! matchless ! ” 

So the epithets ran on in thick guttural 
voices, diffusing a smell of lager-beer so 
strong as they spoke 
that it reached August 
crouching in his 
stronghold. If they 
should open the door 
of the stove ! That 
was his frantic fear. 

If they should open 
it, it would be all over 
with him. They 
would drag him out ; 
most likely they 
would kill him, he 
thought, as his moth- 
er’s young brother 
had been killed in the Wald. 

The perspiration rolled off his forehead 
in his agony ; but he had control enough 
over himself to keep quiet, and after stand- 
ing by the Nurnberg master’s work for 



72 THE N URN BERG STOVE. 

nigh an hour, praising, marvelling, expati- 
ating in the lengthy German tongue, the 
men moved to a little distance and began 
talking of sums of money and divided 
profits, of which discourse he could make 
out no meaning. All he could make out 
was that the name of the king — the king 
— the king came over very often in their 
arguments. He fancied at times they 
quarrelled, for they swore lustily and their 
voices rose hoarse and high ; but after a 
while they seemed to pacify each other and 
agree to something, and were in great glee, 
and so in these merry spirits came and 
slapped the luminous sides of stately 
Hirschvogel, and shouted to it, — 

“ Old Mumchance, you have brought us 
rare good luck ! To think you were smok- 
ing in a silly fool of a salt-baker’s kitchen 
all these years ! ” 

Then inside the stove August jumped 
up, with flaming cheeks and clinching 
hands, and was almost on the point of 
shouting out to them that they were the 
thieves and should say no evil of his father, 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 73 

when he remembered, just in time, that to 
breathe a word or make a sound was to 
bring ruin on himself and sever him forever 
from Hirschvogel. So he kept quite still, 
and the men barred the shutters of the little 
lattice and went out by the door, double- 
locking it after them. He had made out 
from their talk that they were going to 
show Hirschvogel to some great person : 
therefore he kept quite still and dared not 
move. 

Muffled sounds came to him through the 
shutters from the streets below, — the roll- 
ing of wheels, the clanging of church-bells, 
and bursts of that military music which is 
so seldom silent in the streets of Munich. 
An hour perhaps passed by ; sounds of 
steps on the stairs kept him in perpetual 
apprehension. In the intensity of his 
anxiety, he forgot that he was hungry and 
many miles away from cheerful, Old World 
little Hall, lying by the clear gray river- 
water, with the ramparts of the mountains 
all around. 

Presently the door opened again sharply. 


74 the nurnberg stove. 

He could hear the two dealers’ voices mur- 
muring unctuous words, in which “honor,” 
“ gratitude,” and many fine long noble titles 
played the chief parts. The voice of an- 
other person, more clear and refined than 
theirs, answered them curtly, and then, 
close by the Nurnberg stove and the boy’s 
ear, ejaculated a single “ Wunderschon /” 
August almost lost his terror for himself in 
his thrill of pride at his beloved Hirsch- 
vogel being thus admired in the great city. 
He thought the master-potter must be 
glad too. 

“ Wunderschon /” ejaculated the stranger 
a second time, and then examined the 
stove in all its parts, read all its mottoes, 
gazed long on all its devices. 

“ It must have been made for the Em- 
peror Maximilian,” he said at last ; and the 
poor little boy, meanwhile, within, was 
“ hugged up into nothing,” as you children 
say, dreading that every moment he would 
open the stove. And open it truly he did, 
and examined the brass-work of the door ; 
but inside it was so dark that crouching 


THE N URN BERG STOVE . 75 

August passed unnoticed, screwed up into 
a ball like a hedgehog as he was. The 
gentleman shut to the door at length, with- 
out having seen anything strange inside it ; 
and then he talked long and low with the 
tradesmen, and, as his accent was different 
from that which August was used to, the 
child could distinguish little that he said, 
except the name of the king and the 
word “gulden” again and again. After 
a while he went away, one of the dealers 
accompanying him, one of them lingering 
behind to bar up the shutters. Then this 
one also withdrew again, double-locking 
the door. 

The poor little hedgehog uncurled itself 
and dared to breathe aloud. 

What time was it? 

Late in the day, he thought, for to ac- 
company the stranger they had lighted a 
lamp ; he had heard the scratch of the match, 
and through the brass fret-work had seen 
the lines of light. 

He would have to pass the night here, 
that was certain. He and Hirschvogel 


76 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

were locked in, but at least they were to- 
gether. If only he could have had some- 
thing to eat ! He thought with a pang of 
how at this hour at home they ate the 
sweet soup, sometimes with apples in it 
from Aunt Mafia’s farm orchard, and sang 
together, and listened to Dorothea’s read- 
ing of little tales, and basked in the glow 
and delight that had beamed on them from 
the great Niirnberg fire-king. 

“ Oh, poor, poor little ’Gilda ! What is 
she doing without the dear Hirschvogel ? ” 
he thought. Poor little ’Gilda ! she had 
only now the black iron stove of the ugly 
little kitchen. Oh, how cruel of father! 

August could not bear to hear the deal- 
ers blame or laugh at his father, but he did 
feel that it had been so, so cruel to sell 
Hirschvogel. The mere memory of all 
those long winter evenings, when they had 
all closed round it, and roasted chestnuts or 
crab-apples in it, and listened to the howl- 
ing of the wind and the deep sound of the 
church-bells, and tried very much to make 
each other believe that the wolves still 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


77 


came down from the mountains into the 
streets of Hall, and were that very minute 
growling at the house door, — all this 
memory coming on him with the sound of 
the city bells, and the knowledge that night 
drew near upon him so completely, being 
added to his hunger and his fear, so over- 
came him that he burst out crying for the 
fiftieth time since he had been inside the 
stove, and felt that he would starve to 
death, and wondered dreamily if Hirsch- 
vogel would care. Yes, he was sure 
Hirschvogel would care. Had he not 
decked it all summer long with alpine roses 
and edelweiss and heaths and made it 
sweet with thyme and honeysuckle and 
great garden-lilies ? Had he ever forgotten 
when Santa Claus came to make it its 
crown of holly and ivy and wreathe it all 
around ? 

“ Oh, shelter me; save me; take care of 
me ! ” he prayed to the old fire-king, and 
forgot, poor little man, that he had come 
on this wild-goose chase northward to save 
and take care of Hirschvogel! 


78 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


After a time he dropped asleep, as chil- 
dren can do when they weep, and little 
robust hill-born boys most surely do, be 
they where they may. It was not very 
cold in this lumber-room; it was tightly 
shut up, and very full of things, and at the 
back of it were the hot pipes of an adjacent 
house, where a great deal of fuel was burnt. 
Moreover, August’s clothes were warm 
ones, and his blood was young. So he 
was not cold, though Munich is terribly 
cold in the nights of December ; and he 
slept on and on, — which was a comfort to 
him, for he forgot his woes, and his perils, 
and his hunger for a time. 

Midnight was once more chiming from all 
the brazen tongues of the city when he 
awoke, and, all being still around him, 
ventured to put his head out of the brass 
door of the stove to see why such a strange 
bright light was round him. 

It was a very strange and brilliant light 
indeed ; and yet, what is perhaps still 
stranger, it did not frighten or amaze him, 
nor did what he saw alarm him either, and 


79 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

yet I think it would have done you or me. 
For what he saw was nothing less than all 
the bric-a-brac in motion. 

A big jug, an Apos- 
tel-Krug, of Kruessen, 
was solemnly dancing a 
minuet with a plump 
Faenza jar ; a tall Dutch 
clock was going through 
a gavotte with a spindle-legged ancient 
chair ; a very droll porcelain figure of Zitz- 
enhausen was bowing to a very stiff 
soldier in terre cuite of Ulm ; 
an old violin of Cremona was 
playing itself, and a queer 
little shrill plaintive music 
that thought itself merry 
came from a painted spinnet 
covered with faded roses; 
some gilt Spanish leather 
had got up on the wall and 
laughed ; a Dresden mirror 
was tripping about, crowned with flowers, 
and a Japanese bonze was riding along 
on a griffin ; a slim Venetian rapier had 




8o 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


come to blows with a stout Ferrara sabre, 
all about a little pale-faced chit of a 
damsel in white Nymphenburg china; 
and a portly Franconian pitcher in 
gres gris was calling aloud, “Oh, 
these Italians ! always at feud! ” But 
nobody listened to him at all. A 
great number of little Dresden cups 
and saucers were all skipping and 
waltzing ; the teapots, with their 
broad round faces, were spinning their 
own lids like teetotums; the high- 
backed gilded chairs were having a 
game of cards together ; and a little 
Saxe poodle, with a 
blue ribbon at its 
throat, was running from 
one to another, whilst 
a yellow cat of Cornells Zachtleven’s 
rode about on a Delft horse in blue 
pottery of 1489. Meanwhile the 
brilliant light shed on the scene 
came from three silver candelabra, 
though they had no candles set up in 
them ; and, what is the greatest miracle of 





THE NURNBERG STOVE . 


8l 


all, August looked on at these mad freaks 
and felt no sensation of wonder ! He only, « 
as he heard the violin and the spinnet play- 
ing, felt an irresistible desire to dance 
too. 

No doubt his face said what he wished ; 
for a lovely little lady, all in pink and gold 
and white, with powdered hair, and high- 
heeled shoes, and all made of the very 
finest and fairest Meissen china, tripped 
up to him, and smiled, and 
gave him her hand, and led 
him out to a minuet. And he 
danced it perfectly, — poor lit- 
tle August in his thick, clumsy 
shoes, and his thick, clumsy 
sheepskin jacket, and his rough homespun 
linen, and his broad Tyrolean hat! He 
must have danced it perfectly, this dance 
of kings and queens in days when crowns 
were duly honored, for the lovely lady al- 
ways smiled benignly and never scolded 
him at all, and danced so divinely herself 
to the stately measures the spinnet was 
playing that August could not take his 



82 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


eyes off her till, the minuet ended, she sat 
down on her own white-and-gold bracket. 

“ I am the Princess of Saxe- Royal,” she 
said to him, with a benignant smile; “and 
you have got through that minuet very 
fairly.” 

Then he ventured to say to her, — 

“Madame my princess, could you tell 
me kindly why some of the figures and 
furniture dance and speak, and some lie 
up in a corner like lumber? It does 
make me curious. Is it rude to ask?” 

For it greatly puzzled him why, when 
some of the bric-a-brac was all full of life 
and motion, some was quite still and 
had not a single thrill in it. 

“My dear child,” said the powdered 
lady, “ is it possible that you do not know 
the reason? Why, those silent, dull things 
are imitation ! ” 

This she said with so much decision that 
she evidently considered it a condensed 
but complete answer. 

“Imitation?” repeated August, timidly, 
not understanding. 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 83 

“Of course! Lies, falsehoods, fabrica- 
tions ! ” said the princess in pink shoes, 
very vivaciously. “ They only pretend to 
be what we are! They never wake up : 
how can they? No imitation ever had any 
soul in it yet.” 

“Oh!” said August, humbly, not even 
sure that he understood entirely yet. He 
looked at Hirschvogel : surely it had a 
royal soul within it: would it not wake up 
and speak ? Oh dear ! how he longed to 
hear the voice of his fire-king ! And he 
began to forget that he stood by a lady 
who sat upon a pedestal of gold-and-white 
china, with the year 1 746 cut on it, and the 
Meissen mark. 

“ What will you be when you are a 
man ? ” said the little lady, sharply, for her 
black eyes were quick though her red lips 
were smiling. “ Will you work for the 
Konigliche Porcellan- Manufactur , like my 
great dead Handler?” 

“ I have never thought,” said August, 
stammering; “at least — that is — I do 
wish — I do hope to be a painter, as was 


84 the nurnberg stove. 

Master Augustin Hirschvogel at Nurn- 
berg.” 

“ Bravo!” said all the real bric-a-brac in 
one breath, and the two Italian rapiers left 
off fighting to cry, “ Benone f” For there 
is not a bit of true bric-a-brac in all Eu- 
rope that does not know the names of the 
mighty masters. 

August felt quite pleased to 
have won so much applause, and 
grew as red as the lady’s shoes 
with bashful contentment. 

“ I knew all the Hirschvogel, 
from old Veit downwards, ” said 
a fat gres de Flandre beer- 
jug : “ I myself was made at 

Nurnberg.” And he bowed to the great 
stove very politely, taking off his own 
silver hat — I mean lid — with a courtly 
sweep that he could scarcely have learned 
from burgomasters. The stove, however, 
was silent, and a sickening suspicion (for 
what is such heart-break as a suspicion of 
what we love?) came through the mind of 
August : Was Hirschvogel only imitation ? 



THE N URN BERG STOVE . 


85 


“ No, no, no, no ! ” he said to himself, 
stoutly : though Hirschvogel never stirred, 
never spoke, yet would he keep all faith in 
it ! After all their happy years together, 
after all the nights of warmth and joy he 
owed it, should he doubt his own friend 
and hero, whose gilt lion’s feet he had 
kissed in his babyhood ? “ No, no, no, 

no ! ” he said, again, with so much 
emphasis that the Lady of Meissen 
looked sharply again at him. 

“ No,” she said, with pretty disdain; 

“no, believe me, they may ‘pretend’ 
forever. They can never look like us ! 
They imitate even our marks, but 
never can they look like the real 
thing, never can they chassent de 
race .” ' 



“ How should they?” said a bronze stat- 
uette of Vischer’s. “They daub them- 
selves green with verdigris, or sit out in 
the rain to get rusted; but green and rust 
are not patina; only the ages can give 
that!” 


“And my imitations are all in primary 


86 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

colors, staring colors, hot as the colors of 
a hostelry’s sign-board ! ” said the Lady of 
Meissen, with a shiver. 

“ Well, there is a gres de Flandre over 
there, who pretends to be a Hans Kraut, 
as I am,” said the jug with the silver hat, 
pointing with his handle to a jug that 
lay prone on its side in a corner. “ He 
has copied me as exactly as it is given to 
moderns to copy us. Almost he might be 
mistaken for me. But yet what a differ- 
ence there is ! How crude are his blues ! 
how evidently done over the glaze are his 
black letters ! He has tried to give him- 
self my very twist ; but what a lamentable 
exaggeration of that playful deviation in 
my lines which in his becomes actual 
deformity ! ” 

“ And look at that,” said the gilt Cordo- 
van leather, with a contemptuous glance at 
a broad piece of gilded leather spread out 
on a table. “They will sell him cheek by 
jowl with me, and give him my name; but 
look ! / am overlaid with pure gold beaten 

thin as a film and laid on me in absolute 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


87 


honesty by worthy Diego de las Gorgias, 
worker in leather of lovely Cordova in the 
blessed reign of Ferdinand the Most Chris- 
tian. His gilding is one part gold to 
eleven other parts of brass and rubbish, and 
it has been laid on him with a brush — a 
brush! — pah! of course he will be as black 
as a crock in a few years’ time, whilst I am 
as bright as when I first was made, and, 
unless I am burnt as my Cordova burnt 
its heretics, I shall shine on forever.” 

“ They carve pear-wood because it is so 
soft, and dye it brown, and call it me!" 
said an old oak cabinet, with a chuckle. 

“That is not so painful; it does not 
vulgarize you so much as the cups they 
paint to-day and christen after me ! ” said 
a Carl Theodor cup subdued in hue, yet 
gorgeous as a jewel. 

“ Nothing can be so annoying as to see 
common gimcracks aping me !" interposed 
the princess in the pink shoes. 

“ They even steal my motto, though it is 
Scripture,” said a Trauerkrug of Regens- 
burg in black-and-white. 


88 


7 HE N URN BERG STOVE. 




“And my own dots they put on plain 
English china creatures ! ” sighed the little 
white maid of Nymphenburg. 

“ And they sell hundreds 
and thousands of common 
china plates, calling them 
after me, and baking my 
saints and my legends in a 
muffle of to-day ; it is blas- 
phemy ! ” said a stout plate 
of Gubbio, which in its year of birth had 
seen the face of Maestro Giorgio. 

“That is what is so 
terrible in these bric-a- 
brac places,” said the 
princess of Meissen. “ It 
brings one in contact 
with such low, imitative 
creatures ; one really is 
safe nowhere nowadays 
unless under glass at 
the Louvre or South 
Kensington.” 

“ And they get even there,” sighed the 
gres de Flandre. “ A terrible thing hap- 




THE N URN BERG STOVE. 89 

pened to a dear friend of mine, a terre 
cuite of Blasius (you know the terres cuites 
of Blasius date from 1560). Well, he was 
put under glass in a museum that shall be 
nameless, and he found himself set next to 
his own imitation born and baked yester- 
day at Frankfort, and what think you the 
miserable creature said to him, with a 
grin? ‘Old Pipeclay,’ — that 
is what he called my friend, 

— ‘the fellow that bought me 
got just as much commission 
on me as the fellow that 
bought you , and that was all 
that he thought about. You 
know it is only the public 
money that goes ! ’ And 
the horrid creature grinned again tin he 
actually cracked himself. There is a Prov- 
dence above all things, even museums.” 

“ Providence might have interfered be- 
fore, and saved the public money,” said 
the little Meissen lady with the pink 
shoes. 

“After all, does it matter?” said a Dutch 



90 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


jar of Haarlem. “All the shamming in 
the world will not make them us ! ” 

“ One does not like to be vulgarized,” 
said the Lady of Meissen, angrily. 

“ My maker, the Krabbetje, 1 did not 
trouble his head about that,” said the Haar- 
lem jar, proudly. “The Krabbetje made 
me for the kitchen, the bright, clean, snow- 
white Dutch kitchen, wellnigh three 
centuries ago, and now I am thought 
worthy the palace ; yet I wish I were 
at home ; yes, I wish I could see the 
good Dutch vrouw, and the shin- 
ing canals, and the great green 
meadows dotted with the kine.” 
“Ah! if we could all go back to our mak- 
ers ! ” sighed the Gubbio plate, thinking of 
Giorgio Andreoli and the glad and gra- 
cious days of the Renaissance : and some- 
how the words touched the frolicsome 
souls of the dancing jars, the spinning tea- 
pots, the chairs that were playing cards; 
and the violin stopped its merry music 

1 Jan Asselyn, called Krabbetje, the Little Crab, born 1610, 
master-potter of Delft and Haarlem. 



THE N URN BERG STORE. 91 

with a sob, and the spinnet sighed, — think- 
ing of dead hands. 

Even the little Saxe poodle howled for 
a master forever lost; and only the swords 
went on quarreling, and made such a 
clattering noise that the Japanese bonze 
rode at them on his monster and knocked 
them both right over, and they lay straight 
and still, looking foolish, and the little 
Nymphenburg maid, though she was cry- 
ing, smiled and almost laughed. 

Then from where the great stove stood 
there came a solemn voice. 

All eyes turned upon Hirschvogel, and 
the heart of its little human comrade gave 
a great jump of joy. 

“ My friends,” said that clear voice from 
the turret of Nurnberg faience, “ I have 
listened to all you have said. There is too 
much talking among the Mortalities whom 
one of themselves has called the Wind- 
bags. Let not us be like them. I hear 
among men so much vain speech, so much 
precious breath and precious time wasted 
in empty boasts, foolish anger, useless 


92 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

reiteration, blatant argument, ignoble 
mouthings, that I have learned to deem 
speech a curse, laid on man to weaken and 
envenom all his undertakings. For over 
two hundred years I 
have never spoken my- 
self: you, I hear, are not 
so reticent. I only 
speak now because one 
of you said a beautiful 
thing that touched me. 
If we all might but go 
back to our makers ! 
Ah, yes! if we might! 
We were made in days 
when even men were 
true creatures, and so 
we, the work of their 
hands, were true too. 
We, the begotten of ancient days, derive 
all the value in us from the fact that our 
makers wrought at us with zeal, with 
piety, with integrity, with faith, — not to 
win fortunes or to glut a market, but to do 
nobly an honest thing and create for the 




THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


93 


honor of the Arts and God. I see amidst 
you a little human thing who loves me, 
and in his own ignorant childish way loves 
Art. Now, I want him forever to remem- 
ber this night and these words ; to remem- 
ber that we are what we are, and precious 
in the eyes of the world, because centuries 
ago those who were of single mind and of 
pure hand so created us, scorning sham and 
haste and counterfeit. Well do I recollect 
my master, Augustin Hirschvogel. He 
led a wise and blameless life, and wrought 
in loyalty and love, and made his time 
beautiful thereby, like one of his own rich, 
many-colored church casements, that told 
holy tales as the sun streamed through 
them. Ah, yes, my friends, to go back to 
our masters! — that would be the best that 
could befall us. But they are gone, and 
even the perishable labors of their lives 
outlive them. For many, many years I, 
once honored of emperors, dwelt in a 
humble house and warmed in successive 
winters three generations of little, cold, 
hungry children. When I warmed them 


94 THE nurnberg stove . 

they forgot that they were hungry ; they 
laughed and told tales, and slept at last 
about my feet. Then I knew that hum- 
ble as had become my lot it was one that 
my master would have wished for me, and 
I was content. Sometimes a tired woman 
would creep up to me, and smile because 
she was near me, and point out my golden 
crown or my ruddy fruit to a baby in her 
arms. That was better than to stand in a 
great hall of a great city, cold and empty, 
even though wise men came to gaze and 
throngs of fools gaped, passing with flatter- 
ing words. Where I go now I know not ; 
but since I ,go from that humble house 
where they loved me, I shall be sad and 
alone. They pass so soon, — those fleet- 
ing mortal lives ! Only we endure, — we, 
the things that the human brain creates. 
We can but bless them a little as they glide 
by: if we have done that, we have done 
what our masters wished. So in us our 
masters, being dead, yet may speak and 
live.” 

Then the voice sank away in silence, and 


95 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

a strange golden light that had shone on 
the great stove faded away ; so also the 
light died down in the silver candelabra. 
A soft, pathetic melody stole gently through 
the room. It came from the old, old 
spinnet that was covered with the faded 
roses. 

Then that sad, sighing music of a by- 
gone day died too ; the clocks of the city 
struck six of the morning ; day was rising 
over the Bayerischenwald. August awoke 
with a great start, and found himself lying 
on the bare bricks of the floor of the cham- 
ber ; and all the bric-a-brac was lying quite 
still all around. The pretty Lady of 
Meissen was motionless on her porcelain 
bracket, and the little Saxe poodle was 
quiet at her side. 

He rose slowly to his feet. He was very 
cold, but he was not sensible of it or of the 
hunger that was gnawing his little empty 
entrails. He was absorbed in the won- 
drous sight, in the wondrous sounds, that 
he had seen and heard. 

All was dark around him. Was it still 


g6 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

midnight or had morning come ? Morn- 
ing, surely ; for against the barred shutters 
he heard the tiny song of the robin. 

Tramp, tramp, too, came a heavy step 
up the stair. He had but a moment in 
which to scramble back into the interior of 
the great stove, when the door opened and 
the two dealers entered, bringing burning 
candles with them to see their way. 

August was scarcely conscious of danger 
more than he was of cold or hunger. A 
marvellous sense of courage, of security, 
of happiness, was about him, like strong 
and gentle arms enfolding him and lift- 
ing him upwards — upwards — upwards! 
Hirschvogel would defend him. 

The dealers undid the shutters, scaring 
the red-breast away ; and then tramped 
about in their heavy boots and chatted in 
contented voices, and began to wrap up 
the stove once more in all its straw and 
hay and cordage. 

It never once occurred to them to glance 
inside. Why should they look inside a 
stove that they had bought and were 


THE NURNBERG STOVE . 


97 


about to sell again for all its glorious 
beauty of exterior. 

The child still did not feel afraid. A 



great exaltation had come to him : he was 
like one lifted up by his angels. 

Presently the two traders called up their 


98 THE N URN BERG STOVE. 

porters, and the stove, heedfully swathed 
and wrapped ahd tended as though it were 
some sick prince going on a journey, was 
borne on the shoulders of six stout Ba- 
varians down the stairs and out of the 
door into the Marienplatz. Even behind 
all those wrappings August felt the icy 
bite of the intense cold of the outer air at 
dawn of a winter’s day in Munich. The 
men moved the stove with exceeding 
gentleness and care, so that he had often 
been far more roughly shaken in his big 
brothers’ arms than he was in his journey 
now ; and though both hunger and thirst 
made themselves felt, being foes that will 
take no denial, he was still in that state of 
nervous exaltation which deadens all phys- 
ical suffering and is at once a cordial and 
an opiate. He had heard Hirschvogel 
speak ; that was enough. 

The stout carriers tramped through the 
city, six of them, with the Niirnberg fire- 
castle on their brawny shoulders, and went 
right across Munich to the railway-station, 
and August in the dark recognized all the 


THR NURNBERG STOVE. 


99 


ugly, jangling, pounding, roaring, hissing 
railway-noises, and thought, despite his 
courage and excitement, “Will it be a very 
long journey?” For his stomach had at 
times an odd sinking sensation, and his 
head sadly often felt light and swimming. 
If it was a very, very long journey he felt 
half afraid that he would be dead or some- 
thing bad before the end, and Hirschvogel 
would be so lonely : that was what he 
thought most about ; not much about him- 
self, and not much about Dorothea and 
the house at home. He was “high strung 
to high emprise,” and could not look be- 
hind him. 

Whether for a long or a short journey, 
whether for weal or woe, the stove with 
August still within it was once more 
hoisted up into a great van ; but this time 
it was not all alone, and the two dealers as 
well as the six porters were all with it. 

He in his darkness knew that ; for he 
heard their voices. The train glided away 
over the Bavarian plain southward ; and he 
heard the men say something of Berg and 


TOO 


THE NURNBERG STOVE . 


the Wurm-See, but their German was 
strange to him, and he could not make out 
what these names meant. 


The train rolled on, with all its fume and 
fuss, and roar of steam, and stench of oil 
and burning coal. It had to go quietly 



and slowly on account of the snow which 
was falling, and which had fallen all night. 

“He might have waited till he came to 
the city,” grumbled one man to another. 
“What weather to stay on at Berg!” 

But who he was that stayed on at Berg, 
August could not make out at all. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


IOI 


Though the men grumbled about the 
state of the roads and the season, they 
were hilarious and well content, for they 
laughed often, and, when they swore, did 
so good-humoredly, and promised their 
porters fine presents at New- Year; and 
August, like a shrewd little boy as he was, 
who even in the secluded Innthal had 
learned that money is the chief mover of 
men’s mirth, thought to himself, with a 
terrible pang, — 

“They have sold Hirschvogel for some 
great sum! They have sold him already!” 

Then his heart grew faint and sick with- 
in him, for he knew very well that he must 
soon die, shut up without food and water 
thus ; and what new owner of the great 
fire-palace would ever permit him to dwell 
in it? 

“ Never mind ; I will die,” thought he ; 
“ and Hirschvogel will know it.” 

Perhaps you think him a very foolish 
little fellow ; but I do not. 

It is always good to be loyal and ready 
to endure to the end. 


102 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

It is but an hour and a quarter that the 
train usually takes to pass from Munich to 
the Wurm-See or Lake of Starnberg ; but 
this morning the journey was much slower, 
because the way was encumbered by snow. 
When it did reach Possenhofen and stop, 
and the Nurnberg stove was lifted out once 
more, August could see through the fret- 



work of the brass door, as the stove stood 
upright facing the lake, that this Wurm- 
See was a calm and noble piece of water, 
of great width, with low wooded banks and 
distant mountains, a peaceful, serene place, 
full of rest. 

It was now near ten o’clock. The sun 
had come forth ; there was a clear gray sky 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 103 

hereabouts ; the snow was not falling, 
though it lay white and smooth every- 
where, down to the edge of the water, 
which before long would itself be ice. 

Before he had time to get more than a 
glimpse of the green gliding surface, the 
stove was again lifted up and placed on a 
large boat that was in waiting, — one of 
those very long and huge boats which the 
women in these parts use as laundries, and 
the men as timber-rafts. The stove, with 
much labor and much expenditure of time 
and care, was hoisted into this, and August 
would have grown sick and giddy with, the 
heaving and falling if his big brothers had 
not long used him to such tossing about, 
so that he was as much at ease head, as 
feet, downward. The stove, once in it 
safely with its guardians, the big boat 
moved across the lake to Leoni. How a 
little hamlet on a Bavarian lake got that 
Tuscan-sounding name I cannot tell ; but 
Leoni it is. The big boat was a long time 
crossing; the lake here is about three 
miles broad, and these heavy barges are 


104 THE NURNBERG stove. 

unwieldy and heavy to move, even though 
they are towed and tugged at from the 
shore. 

“If we should be too late!” the two 
dealers muttered to each other, in agitation 
and alarm. “ He said eleven o’clock.” 
“Who was he?” thought August; “the 



buyer, of course, of Hirschvogel.” The 
slow passage across the Wurm-See was 
accomplished at length : the lake was 
placid ; there was a sweet calm in the air 
and on the water ; there was a great deal 
of snow in the sky, though the sun was 
shining and gave a solemn hush to the 
atmosphere. Boats and one little steamer 


THE N URN BERG STOVE . 


!05 

were going up and down ; in the clear 
frosty light the distant mountains of Ziller- 
thal and the Algau Alps were visible ; 
market-people, cloaked and furred, went 
by on the water or on the banks ; the deep 
woods of the shores were black and gray 
and brown. Poor August could see noth- 
ing of a scene that would have delighted 
him ; as the stove was now set, he could 
only see the old worm-eaten wood of the 
huge barge. 

Presently they touched the pier at Leoni. 

“ Now, men, for a stout mile and half ! 
You shall drink your reward at Christmas- 
time,” said one of the dealers to his 
porters, who, stout, strong men as they 
were, showed a disposition to grumble at 
their task. Encouraged by large promises, 
they shouldered sullenly the Niirnberg 
stove, grumbling again at its preposterous 
weight, but little dreaming that they car- 
ried within it a small, panting, trembling 
boy ; for August began to tremble now 
that he was about to see the future owner 
of Hirschvogel. 


106 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

“ If he look a good, kind man,” he 
thought, “ I will beg him to let me stay 
with it.” 

The porters began their toilsome jour- 
ney, and moved off from the village pier. 



He could see nothing, for the brass door 
was over his head, and all that gleamed 
through it was the clear gray sky. He 
had been tilted on to his back, and if he 
had not been a little mountaineer, used to 
hanging head-downwards over crevasses, 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. IO J 

and, moreover, seasoned to rough treat- 
ment by the hunters and guides of the 
hills and the salt-workers in the town, he 
would have been made ill and sick by the 
bruising and shaking and many changes of 
position to which he had been subjected. 

The way the men took was a mile and 
a half in length, but the road was heavy 
with snow, and the burden they bore was 
heavier still. The dealers cheered them 
on, swore at them and praised them in 
one breath ; besought them and reiterated 
their splendid promises, for a clock was 
striking eleven, and they had been ordered 
to reach their destination at that hour, and, 
though the air was so cold, the heat-drops 
rolled off their foreheads as they walked, 
they were so frightened at being late. 
But the porters would not budge a foot 
quicker than they chose, and as they were 
not poor four-footed carriers their employ- 
ers dared not thrash them, though most 
willingly would they have done so. 

The road seemed terribly long to the 
anxious tradesmen, to the plodding 


IOB THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

porters, to the poor little man inside the 
stove, as he kept sinking and rising, sink- 
ing and rising, with each of their steps. 

Where they were going he had no idea, 
only after a very long time he lost the 
sense of the fresh icy wind blowing on his 
face through the brass-work above, and felt 
by their movements beneath him that they 
were mounting steps or stairs. Then he 
heard a great many different voices, but he 
could not understand what was being said. 
He felt that his bearers paused some time, 
then moved on and on again. Their feet 
went so softly he thought they must be mov- 
ing on carpet, and as he felt a warm air come 
to him he concluded that he was in some 
heated chambers, for he was a clever little 
fellow, and could put two and two together, 
though he was so hungry and so thirsty 
and his empty stomach felt so strangely. 
They must have gone, he thought, through 
some very great number of rooms, for they 
walked so long on and on, on and on. At last 
the stove was set down again, and, happily 
for him, set so that his feet were downward. 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


IO9 


What he fancied was that he was in 
some museum, like that which he had seen 
in the city of Innspruck. 

The voices he heard were very hushed, 
and the steps seemed to go away, far 
away, leaving him alone with Hirschvogel. 
He dared not look out, but he peeped 
through the brass-work, and all he could 
see was a big carved lion’s head in ivory, 
with a gold crown atop. It belonged to a 
velvet fauteuil, but he could not see the 
chair, only the ivory lion. 

There was a delicious fragrance in the 
air, — a fragrance as of flowers. “Only 
how can it be flowers ? ” thought August. 
“ It is November ! ” 

From afar off, as it seemed, there came 
a dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the 
spinnet’s had been, but so much fuller, so 
much richer, seeming as though a chorus 
of angels were singing all together. Au- 
gust ceased to think of the museum ; he 
thought of heaven. “Are we gone to the 
Master ?” he thought, remembering the 
words of Hirschvogel. 


I IO 


THE NURNBERG STORE. 


All was so still around him ; there was 
no sound anywhere except the sound of 
the far-off choral music. 

He did not know it, but he was in the 
royal castle of Berg, and the music he 
heard was the music of Wagner, who was 
playing in a distant room some of the 
motives of “ Parsival.” 

Presently he heard a fresh step near 
him, and he heard a low voice say, close 
behind him, “ So !” An exclamation no 
doubt, he thought, of admiration and won- 
der at the beauty of Hirschvogel. 

Then the same voice said, after a long 
pause, during which no doubt, as August 
thought, this new comer was examining all 
the details of the wondrous fire-tower, “ It 
was well bought ; it is exceedingly beauti- 
ful ! It is most undoubtedly the work of 
Augustin Hirschvogel.” 

Then the hand of the speaker turned the 
round handle of the brass door, and the 
fainting soul of the poor little prisoner 
within grew sick with fear. 

The handle turned, the door was slowly 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


I I I 


drawn open, some one bent down and 
looked in, and the same voice that he had 
heard in praise of its beauty called aloud, 
in surprise, “What is this in it? Alive 
child !” 

Then August, terrified beyond all self- 
control, and dominated by one master- 
passion, sprang out of the body of the 
stove and fell at the feet of the speaker. 

“Oh, let me stay! Pray, meinherr let 
me stay!” he sobbed. “I have come all 
the way with Hirschvogel ! ” 

Some gentlemen’s hands seized him, not 
gently by any means, and their lips angrily 
muttered in his ear, “ Little knave, peace ! 
be quiet! hold your tongue! It is the 
king! ” 

They were about to drag him out of the 
august atmosphere as if he had been some 
venomous, dangerous beast come there to 
slay, but the voice he had heard speak of 
the stove said, in kind accents / 4 Poor little 
child ! he is very young. Let him go : let 
him speak to me.” 

The word of a king is law to his court- 


I 12 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


iers : so, sorely against their wish, the 
angry and astonished chamberlains let 
August slide out of their grasp, and he 



stood there in his little rough sheepskin 
coat and his thick, mud-covered boots, 
with his curling hair all in a tangle, in the 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


113 

midst of the most beautiful chamber he had 
ever dreamed of, and in the presence of a 
young man with a beautiful dark face, and 
eyes full of dreams and fire ; and the young 
man said to him, — 

“My child, how came you here, hidden 



in this stove ? Be not afraid : tell me the 
truth. I am the king.” 

August in an instinct of homage cast his 
great battered black hat with the tarnished 
gold tassels down on the floor of the room, 
and folded his little brown hands in suppli- 
cation. He was too intensely in earnest to 


I 14 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

be in any way abashed ; he was too lifted 
out of himself by his love for Hirschvogel 
to be conscious of any awe before any 
earthly majesty. He was only so glad — 



ways kind ; so the Tyrolese think, who love 
their lords. 


“ Oh, dear king ! ” he said, with trembling 
entreaty in his faint little voice, “ Hirsch- 
vogel was ours, and we have loved it all 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. I 15 

our lives ; and father sold it. And when I 
saw that it did really go from us, then I 
said to myself I would go with it; and I 
have come all the way inside it. And last 
night it spoke and said beautiful things. 
And I do pray you to let me live with it, 
and I will go out every morning and cut 
wood for it and you, if only you will let me 
stay beside it. No one ever has fed it with 
fuel but me since I grew big enough, and 
it loves me ; it does indeed ; it said so last 
night ; and it said that it had been happier 
with us than if it were in any palace — ” 

And then his breath failed him, and, as 
he lifted his little, eager, pale face to the 
young king’s, great tears were falling down 
his cheeks. 

Now, the king likes all poetic and uncom- 
mon things, and there was that in the 
child’s face which pleased and touched him. 
He motioned to his gentlemen to leave the 
little boy alone. 

“ What is your name ?” he asked him. 

“ I am August Strehla. My father is 
Hans Strehla. We live in Hall, in the Inn- 


1 1 6 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

thal; and Hirschvogel has been ours so 
long, — so long ! ” 

His lips quivered with a broken sob. 

“ And have you truly travelled inside 
this stove all the way from Tyrol ? ” 

“Yes,” said August; “no one thought 
to look inside till you did.” 

The king laughed ; then another view of 
the matter occurred to him. 

“ Who bought the stove of your father? ” 
he inquired. 

“ Traders of Munich,” said August, who 
did not know that he ought not to have 
spoken to the king as to a simple citizen, 
and whose little brain was whirling and 
spinning dizzily round its one central idea. 

“ What sum did they pay your father, do 
you know ? ” asked the sovereign. 

“Two hundred florins,” said August, 
with a great sigh of shame. “It was so 
much money, and he is so poor, and there 
are so many of us.” 

The king turned to his gentlemen-in- 
waiting. “ Did these dealers of Munich 
come with the stove ? ” 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


II 7 

He was answered in the affirmative. 
He desired them to be sought for and 
brought before him. As one of his cham- 
berlains hastened on the errand, the 
monarch looked at August with compas- 
sion. 

“You are very pale, little fellow: when 
did you eat last ? ” 

“ I had some bread and sausage with 
me ; yesterday afternoon I finished it. ” 

“You would like to eat now?” 

“ If I might have a little water I would be 
glad ; my throat is very dry.” 

The king had water and wine brought 
for him, and cake also ; but August, though 
he drank eagerly, could not swallow any- 
thing. His mind was in too great a tumult. 

“ May I stay with Hirschvogel ? — may 
I stay ? ” he said, with feverish agitation. 

“Wait a little,” said the king, and asked, 
abruptly, “ What do you wish to be when 
you are a man ? ” 

“ A painter. I wish to be what Hirsch- 
vogel was, — I mean the master that made 
my Hirschvogel.” 


I I 8 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

“ I understand,” said the king. 

Then the two dealers were brought into 
their sovereign’s presence. They were so 



terribly alarmed, not being either so inno- 
cent or so ignorant as August was, that 
they were trembling as though they were 
being led to the slaughter, and they were 


THE N URN BERG STOVE. 


II 9 

so utterly astonished too at a child having 
come all the way from Tyrol in the stove, 
as a gentleman of the court had just told 
them this child had done, that they could 
not tell what to say or where to look, and 
presented a very foolish aspect indeed. 

“ Did you buy this Niirnberg stove of 
this little boy’s father for two hundred 
florins ? ” the king asked them ; and his 
voice was no longer soft and kind as it had 
been when addressing the child, but very 
stern. 

“ Yes, your majesty,” murmured the 
trembling traders. 

“And how much did the gentleman who 
purchased it for me give to you ?” 

“Two thousand ducats, your majesty,” 
muttered the dealers, frightened out of 
their wits, and telling the truth in their 
fright. 

The gentleman was not present : he was 
a trusted counsellor in art matters of the 
king’s, and often made purchases for him. 

The king smiled a little, and said noth- 


120 


THE NURNBERG STORE. 


ing. The gentleman had made out the 
price to him as eleven thousand ducats. 

“You will give at once to this boy’s 
father the two thousand gold ducats that 
you received, less the two hundred Austrian 
florins that you paid him,” said the king to 
his humiliated and abject subjects. “You 
are great rogues. Be thankful you are 
not more greatly punished.” 

He dismissed them by a sign to his 
courtiers, and to one of these gave the 
mission of making the dealers of the Ma- 
rienplatz disgorge their ill-gotten gains. 

August heard, and felt dazzled yet mis- 
erable. Two thousand gold Bavarian ducats 
for his father ! Why, his father would 
never need to go any more to the salt- 
baking ! And yet, whether for ducats or 
for florins, Hirschvogel was sold just the 
same, and would the king let him stay with 
it? — would he? 

“Oh, do ! oh, please do!” he murmured, 
joining his little brown weather-stained 
hands, and kneeling down before the young 
monarch, who himself stood absorbed in 


THE NURNBERG STOVE. 


I 2 I 


painful thought, for the deception so basely 
practised for the greedy sake of gain on 
him by a trusted counsellor was bitter to him. 

He looked down on the child, and as he 
did so smiled once more. 

“ Rise up, my little man,” he said, in a 
kind voice; “kneel only to your God. 
Will I let you stay with your Hirschvogel ? 
Yes, I will, you shall stay at my court, and 
you shall be taught to be a painter, — in 
oils or on porcelain as you will, — and you 
must grow up worthily, and win all the 
laurels at our Schools of Art, and if when 
you are twenty-one years old you have 
done well and bravely, then I will give you 
your Niirnberg stove, or, if I am no more 
living, then those who reign after me shall 
do so. And now go away with this gentle- 
man, and be not afraid, and you shall light 
a fire every morning in Hirschvogel, but 
you will not need to go out and cut the 
wood.” 

Then he smiled and stretched out his 
hand ; the courtiers tried to make August 
understand that he ought to bow and touch 


122 THE NURNBERG STOVE. 

it with his lips, but August could not 
understand that anyhow ; he was too happy. 
He threw his two arms about the king’s 
knees, and kissed his feet passionately'; 
then he lost all sense of where he was, and 
fainted away from hunger, and tire, and 
emotion, and wondrous joy. 

As the darkness of his swoon closed in 
on him, he heard in his fancy the voice from 
Hirschvogel saying, — 

“ Let us be worthy our maker !” 

He is only a scholar yet, but he is a 
happy scholar, and promises to be a great 
man. Sometimes he goes back for a few 
days to Hall, where the gold ducats have 
made his father prosperous. In the old 
house-room there is a large white porcelain 
stove of Munich, the king’s gift to Doro- 
thea and ’Gilda. 

And August never goes home without 
going into the great church and saying his 
thanks to God, who blessed his strange 
winter’s journey in the Niirnberg stove. 
As for his dream in the dealers’ room that 
night, he will never admit that he did 




THE N URN BERG STOVE. 123 

dream it ; he still declares that he saw it all 
and heard the voice of Hirschvogel. And 
who shall say that he did not ? for what is 
the gift of the poet and the artist except to 
see the sights which others cannot see and 
to hear the sounds thatothers cannot hear? 



























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